It was horrible to start with. My first phone call went really badly. Not only did I flub the intro by speaking at 60 words a minute, he really wasn’t interested. So uninterested, I didn’t even have time to apologize after finding out before the phone went click.

Disheartening start. Luckily, it got better. The last three people to answer the phone were all lovely bubbly women. All of them giggled at the line “I’m making a sales call, so I’ll understand if you want to hang up.”

No meetings yet, but the important thing was starting. Now the important thing is continuing. Making the sales can come later.

Most cars have an aux port or a USB port these days. Usually they are in an accessible location. Not these. It took me a lot of fiddling, an Internet search and a scan through the manual before I figured out how to get what I wanted. What I wanted was the cunningly hidden button underneath the leather armrest.

Is it too much to ask for a button that is visible from above? A leather covered knob that sticks out and is clearly meant to be used? Using a magnet lock instead of a clip and button would have helped too.

I will give them one plus though. Unlike many similar designs, the insignia’s armrest can be locked closed without crushing the cables coming out of it. That’s almost a miracle in it’s own right.

My account is closed — why are you telling me I have a credit limit? After finding their basic phone number (Say No to 0870 is very useful for calling premium rate lines without paying premium rate prices) and waiting on hold for five minutes, I found out that they had an error and sent out statements to lots of closed accounts.

No apology from Daniel on the other end either. He just stated the fact and told me I’d be taken off the mailing list. Why didn’t the closure of my account take me off the list too?

So MBNA wasted money printing the paper, putting it in envelopes and tracking it to the destination just to get people to ring a premium rate phone number. What a waste of time and money for everyone involved.

I spent my whole day implementing a server design over and over again. It’s been two years since I last did it and it was remarkable how much less brainpower I needed. That dramatic drop was down to writing down the actions I was about to take and the environment I was going to take them in. Once done, tick them off on the sheet of paper. No more losing your place in the process when somebody interrupts you.

Checklists, surprisingly helpful and surprisingly simple.

There’s two bizarre things going on here. One of which is that /index.php/openid/server will occasionally 404. The other is that it isn’t exposing any provider information through /?xrds.

Time to pull my debugging skills back out.

History

I used to be a software developer. That was all I cared about. People had problems and I could write code to solve them. Pattern Web Solutions was intended as a showcase of my skills and my experiences where I could connect with other problem solvers.

That didn’t work out very well. There are a vast number of problems that can’t be fixed with code. One of them is when you and your environment don’t get along. The first casualty of that friction was the blogging I was doing.

When I left the University of Nottingham to start working for myself, I still owned a dead blog. It had a good name and just needed a few modifications to get it running as a platform for my new business.

So, a small handful of the posts were written in that time and talk about concepts you are unlikely to be familiar with. Why didn’t I just delete them? Let’s take a break and consider the moral of this story.

The Moral

Web pages should be accessible through the same address for as long as possible. When you put something useful out there, keep it there. That’s why they are called permalinks.

Why?

The web is made up of all these links between pages. If you start at one web page and keep clicking links, you can visit the whole of the web. It would take you a very long time but you could do it. Google and Bing use automated robots that do the same thing to find you and add to their search engines.

If links to pages on your domain don’t work anymore, people won’t be able to find what they were looking for. The search robots will also think less of you when they find out.

There’s the core reason. I think that old content is still potentially useful to somebody, so it stays. It stays under the same permalink it had before.

Consider your own web presence. Does it show any kind of history to your visitors? What do you think it will look like in a year? How about 2 or even 5?